News and Analysis
Back to School 2021: Supply Chain Shortages and High Demand
Preparing for back-to-school shopping this year, retailers faced a tremendous challenge: anticipating consumer needs at a time when Covid case numbers are shifting month to month and the conditions of in-person learning remain unclear. Add supply chain squeezes and rising consumer expectations, and BTS, which is supposed to be among many retailers’ best seasonal events, risks proving disastrous.
Delta Variant Leads to Shift in Consumer Behavior — Marketers Respond
With Covid-19 Delta variant cases on the rise, social distancing and sanitation have once again become top priorities for consumers. According to new data by Avionos, consumers are growing increasingly wary of shopping in physical stores due to the rise of the Delta variant. Among those consumers who shopped with a new brand during the pandemic, almost one-third cited safe in-store experiences as a top reason for choosing that brand.
Report: Privacy and Walled Gardens Risk Undermining Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategies, and the data they run on, face systemic risk in 2021. More than ever before, marketers’ access to customer data is being cut off by increased privacy restrictions from governments and private gatekeepers alike.
Commentary
Four Keys to Ensure Your Brand Has Local Authenticity Online
Taking time to ensure that your brand is represented authoritatively and genuinely online helps build a solid connection with your audience. But how does your brand communicate that authenticity at a local level? Here are four essential ways to build local authenticity through your localized social marketing efforts.
Human Judgment, Automation, and the Future of Ad Tech
For now, I propose two major concerns—two challenges, even, for further thought—surrounding AI for the ad tech industry. The first is that the datafication of human experience that has allowed for precise ad targeting needs to be radically reconsidered, not just in terms of what can be done to obtain the consent of consumers for data collection, as the rising privacy movement has called tech companies to consider, but also in terms of what is lost and what is truly gained when the attributes of real people are transformed into consumer data. The second is that the human-machine hybrid decision-making model, while surely the best available in a hypothetical set that also includes human-only and machine-only models, will have to grapple with the bias and poor decisions of the humans who program the machines that will take on the task of regulating large platforms at scale.
Why Conversion Mapping and SEO Go Hand in Hand
Terry Cane: Search engine optimization isn’t just about on-page technical elements. Not anymore. These days, it’s as much about user experience as it is how well you can appeal to search engine robots. And a big part of that is conversion mapping—understanding the route your leads take from their first click to their purchase.
Latest Posts
The Impending HTTPstrophe — And What it Means for Local Businesses
“Google is rapidly moving towards a time when HTTPS will be an absolute necessity for websites,” writes David Mihm to Mike Blumenthal. “As soon as this month if an http:// website contains any input field, users will start getting scary security messages.”
The ABCs of Reputation Management for Brands
Every multilocation brand today has a social media agency or department, and most, though not all, are running some type of local listings management program, whether internally or with a partner. But plenty of brands are neglecting to do anything about online reviews of local stores.
Street Fight Daily: Google Modifies Practices to Help Publishers, Brands Pursue Experiential Marketing
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Unveils Tools to Increase Subscriptions for Publishers… Agencies See Experiential Marketing as the Next Big Thing, and Brands Want In… eMarketer Lowers Snapchat’s Ad Revenue Forecast for 2017…
How a New Active Wear Brand Takes on the Big Guys
California-based Vuori Clothing started as a brand focused on yoga wear for men, and was (and still is) heavily reliant on using hyper-local marketing efforts to build brand awareness. Street Fight recently caught up with marketing VP Nikki Sakelliou to talk about the company’s local efforts.
Street Culture: Hooch Expansion Reveals Value in Multi-Function Employees
Hooch isn’t hiring right now, but they expect to ramp up technology and data positions in fall 2017. Dai says his secret to hiring is to be brutally honest about the challenges and struggles of working at startup.
LBMA Podcast: Amazon, Google, Target
This Week in Location Based Marketing is a weekly video podcast from the Location Based Marketing Association with Asif Khan and Aubriana Lopez. On the show: Zello app, MappedIn, Neiman Marcus, Coca-Cola.
Street Fight Daily: Instagram Fuels Communication with Brands, Mobile’s Domination of Search
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… 80% of Instagram Users Voluntarily Connect with a Brand on the Platform… Mobile to Account for 80% of Search Budgets by 2021… Google is Building a Competitor to Amazon’s Echo Sho…
MomentFeed Leverages Data with New Partner Integration Program
The new MomentFeed Connect product will enable multi-location brands to integrate the MomentFeed platform with hundreds of CRM, help desk, marketing dashboards, and vertical-specific systems through a set of two-way API connectors.
Can the New Scroll Subscription Service Help Embattled Local Publishers?
Tony Haile, until recently the longtime CEO of the highly regarded online-analytics site Chartbeat, is planning to launch a new subscription site that doesn’t try to convert readers from free to paid. He calls it Scroll, and it has $3 million in seed money from formidable publishers including the New York Times, News Corp and Axel Springer.
Webinar Recap: Building the Local Marketing Tech Stack
In a webinar Wednesday, Street Fight’s research director David Card and John Hurley, Radius’s senior director of demand generation and content marketing, discussed how companies such as American Express, iHeartRadio, and DexYP use intelligent platforms and data to get ahead of their rivals.
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